Dylan Farrow’s Response to a Columnist Who Defended Woody Allen Is a Must-Read

For four years—before Hollywood came together under Time's Up and certainly before the current iteration of #MeToo—Dylan Farrow has publicly alleged that her adoptive father, Woody Allen, molested her as a child. She first chillingly detailed her experience in a 2014 essay published in The New York Times. So when the same publication ran a column defending Allen in the wake of these movements, Farrow took to Twitter to slam the author’s claims and speak up once more

The opinion piece in question is titled "The Smearing of Woody Allen" and was published on Friday. Written by Bret Stephens, a foreign and domestic policy correspondent for the Times, it essentially charges that Farrow is capitalizing on the momentum of the #MeToo movement to talk bad about Allen. There's a lot of stuff he leaves out when he goes through Farrow's story to find holes, not least the fact that in 1993, a Connecticut state attorney said he had "probable cause" to go after Allen but never filed charges.

In the piece, Stephens also seems to imply that for someone to really have sexually assault or molest someone, it must have happened multiple times: "Nobody else has come forward in 25 years with a fresh accusation of assault against him…. If Allen is in fact a pedophile, he appears to have acted on his evil fantasies exactly once. Compare that to Larry Nassar’s 265 identified victims."

Farrow wasn't having it. On Saturday she posted a thread slamming Stephens' version of events, which he wasn't there for.

"If @BretStephensNYT is interested, there is much more information he can find on my case than what he cites in his piece, some of which I have posted here," she began. "To presume I invented this story & convinced myself of it is no less insulting than calling me a liar. I’ve consistently stated the truth for 25 years, I won’t stop now. It’s Stephens’ right to doubt me if he so chooses but his incredulity doesn’t change what happened that day."

She then pointed out exactly what happens when a man speaks out to discredit a woman—any woman—speaking out about sexual assault: "What it does do is make it harder for the next victim to come forward."

Farrow has shared her story on a variety of platforms since first coming forward in 2014. In December she wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, asking why #MeToo had thus far spared Allen. In late January she did her first television interview with CBS This Morning, where she expanded on her allegations. (Allen has always maintained his innocence, citing investigations—much of which remain sealed—that concluded in the early nineties.)

As she told Gayle King during her CBS interview, "I have been repeating my accusations unaltered for over 20 years and I have been systematically shut down, ignored, or discredited." Although the time has more than come to believe women—and for men to reckon with their pasts—it seems there's still a long road ahead.